The Sketchpad of a Reasonably Able Drawer
by robotamputee
Summary: This is one of my favourite completed stories. It's on the short side, only 1,541 words, but I love it. It's about Lily and her drawings, and the people she drew.


Lily Evans was pleased to say that she was a fairly decent drawer. Though she was no Picasso, she liked to think she had a knack for drawing things, especially people. She had made a sort of hobby out of it, drawing everyone from her parents and teachers to her friends and even a few Slytherins. It was almost a sort of release for her, when school work and social life became too much to handle. The only downside was that she had taken to studying everyone's faces, like where this story starts, because people often thought she was staring, instead of trying to figure out if their nose needed to be longer.

It was common knowledge that the only good a History of Magic lesson did was let you catch up on your beauty sleep. Even Lily, self-proclaimed goody-goody admitted to dozing off a few times in the past. But after acquiring her habit of drawing, she had taken to doodling people on her notes papers instead. Currently, she was adding the finishing touches to a semi-realistic caricature of her teacher, Mr. Binns, as a ghost (hey, it had to happen eventually, right?). Smiling a little, Lily leaned back in her chair and admired her work. Deciding to draw something original for a change, she pulled a new roll of parchment out of her book-bag, and began some facial features.

She liked to start with the nose, and then create the person around it. She drew a fairly standard nose, maybe a little longer than usual; Then eyes, again, quite normal. A mouth, turned up into an eternal smirk, and she frowned for a moment. She hadn't _meant_ to draw it as a smirk, she had been vying for a pleasant smile, or maybe even a full out grin, but not this strangely _familiar_ smirk.

Shaking her head, Lily continued on to the chin. Not pointed, not round, quite attractive, if she did say so herself, though the face still reminded her of _someone_. Moving on to the hair, she decided to make it fairly scruffy. And black. It reminded her of someone on the tip of her tongue…

Deciding he (she had decided upon drawing the chin that it was male) was missing something, she drew in some glasses. Pondering the face she had just drawn, a sudden wave of understanding washed over her. She knew who she had drawn. Lily looked up hastily; as if afraid he would be able to see her picture merely by her realization that it was indeed _him._

James Potter.

Lily hadn't meant to draw him, hadn't wanted… No, she most certainly did _not_ want to draw that little toe rag. Anyone who had half a brain knew that she and James Potter just did not get along. Well, she didn't get along with him; he seemed to have an impossibly large infatuation with her. But what's more, is that that wasn't the first time she had unconsciously drawn him. For a little over a week ('since the beginning of this year' she thought cynically,) she had found her notebooks strewn with messy-haired or hazel-eyed sketches. The whole thought bubble confused her.

She just didn't understand it. For a full 6 years she had harboured a deep loathing for the boy, why was she suddenly drawing him? He wasn't even all that great to _look_ at, let alone mark onto paper. Of course, she was overlooking the fact that she had admitted he had an attractive chin not five minutes ago. Her friends had teased her to no end about her new-found soft spot for the Marauder (as he and his friends had dubbed themselves many moons ago). She would have none of it. The day she fell for Potter, would be a twisted day indeed.

And yet there she sat drawing yet another Potter-sketch. You see, no matter how many times she drew him he looked like he was missing something. She would make his nose longer, his hair untidier, even attempting to make him into a great ugly troll, but nothing worked. She was almost drawing him _purposely, _just to try and find what wasn't there, but must be. She had drawn him with accessories like his broomstick ('poor lad already takes it with him nearly everywhere he goes.'), the other Marauders ('attached at the hip, the whole lot of them.'), and even a random girl ('can't say I don't already see that every other day.'), but to no avail. He remained positively _lonely._

The bell rang, signalling the end of History of Magic, and Lily seeped into the crowd of students walking towards the outside corridors, stuffing her drawings in her bag as she went. Following her friends back to the Gryffindor common room, Lily tried not to let the mystery bother her.

For the most part, Lily got her wish. Though she still drew a total of 4 ½ (One of them she never finished, having broken her quill) pictures of him, she never thought about that missing entity.

She found herself sitting in yet another History of Magic class about a week later, this time, finishing a drawing of herself, which she was going to send to her mother when it was done. Mrs. Evans said that she would have no idea what her daughter looked like unless Lily sent her drawings of herself at _least _every month.

Adding a few more strokes to her hair, she placed her coloured pencil into one of her book bags pockets. Picking up a normal quill, she wrote her name in the bottom right corner of the page, making sure to add a lot of otherwise unnecessary loops and curls. After storing it in a random textbook so that it didn't get creased, Lily pulled out some spare paper to doodle on for the remaining lesson. She still felt guilty about not taking notes in that class, but she could just as easily look up everything Binns said in a book.

This time, she knew what she was going to draw, and it didn't even bother her. It had become a sort of obsession. On one occasion, he had almost caught her red-handed, but she managed to stuff it down her shirt (she was horrid at thinking under pressure). Of course, being the insensitive berk that he is, he offered (or threatened, more like) to get it still, but that's beside the point.

For the rest of the class, Lily tried to make that drawing of James as accurate and realistic as possible, even sneaking glances at him when she was sure no one was looking. When it was finished, a mere 2 minutes before the end of day bell was due to ring, she felt satisfied that it was one of the best pictures of him she had ever drawn. It was practically a photograph.

'I must find out what's missing.' She thought, and started staring at the picture so hard a frown creased her brow. She became so lost in her thoughts, in fact, that when the bell finally rang, she did not rise. After noticing that Lily was still glaring at the page in front of her, one of her friends took it upon themselves to wake her from her stupor.

"Hey Lils, you know the bell rang, right?" Her friend asked, tapping her on the shoulder. Lily started; she had not known.

"Oh, yeah, right, thanks Aubrey." Lily muttered, shaking her head. Aubrey just nodded and waved, "See you next period!"

Lily waved behind her at Aubrey while hastily piling all her papers together, not even bothering to put them in her bag. She still had to drop all of her doodles off in the Gryffindor common-room and there was only about 5 minutes until next period.

Hurrying out the door, Lily didn't notice that her shoe was currently untied until it was too late. To try and stop her fall, she flung out her arms, sending all her papers flying. Luckily, the corridor was deserted; not so luckily, her papers flew everywhere, and she simply did _not_ have time to collect them all. Of course, magic would've been a big help at the time, but students weren't aloud to use magic in the corridors, and Lily was too much of a good student to break a rule just to save her some time. Cursing under her breath, she got down on hands and knees to pick up her fallen pages. When she was done, she stood up…until she remembered she still had an untied shoelace. Bending down to _carefully _place her papers on the floor next to her shoe, she tied it up, gathered the drawings back into the crook of her right arm, and prepared to stand back up. Then she noticed a couple more pages on the ground a few feet to her left. Straightening fully, she walked towards them.

It was the picture she had drawn just that period of James, along with the self-portrait of herself. Though her picture was underneath the drawing of James, both faces were visible. Suddenly, a strange realization came upon Lily, and one sentence floated to the surface of her mind.

It fit.


End file.
